Sen. Tom Cotton was doubly — triply, quadruply — wrong when he said this week of proposed federal legislation protecting press freedoms: “The liberal media doesn’t deserve more protections.”
Because it isn’t just the liberal media that deserves more protections under the law. It’s the conservative media that deserves more protections, too. It’s the moderate media. It’s the libertarian media. It’s all newsgathering outlets in the nation and the world.
Cotton, R-Arkansas, followed his initial diatribe with: “The press badge doesn’t make you better than the rest of America or put you above the law.”
That’s certainly true — and irrelevant. Unlike in many other countries, where something on the order of a license to publish is mandated for journalistic organizations, any American can declare themselves a journalist. The press badge that many reporters carry is little more than a laminated card from the local sheriff’s department that (sometimes) allows reporters past the yellow tape at a crime scene.
And Cotton wasn’t just spouting off in his remarks on the Senate floor. He rose to block, and succeeded in doing so, “a first-of-its-kind federal shield law for journalists against revealing their confidential sources, arguing its passage would represent a threat to national security,” as Anthony Adragna reports in Politico.
The bill that Cotton blocked is known as The Protect Reporters from Exploitative State Spying Act — or the PRESS Act —which was previously passed by the GOP-controlled House by voice vote last January before it came to the upper chamber of Congress.
In many states, including California, there are local shield laws that protect the confidential sources of reporters from being exposed, and protect the reporters as well.
But there has never been a national law that does the same, and that has put reporters and editors in great jeopardy many times over the centuries for just doing our job: reporting the news when we dig it up, no matter whether it pleases the government or not.
Politico synthesizes what the bill would do: “Under the bill, federal entities would be barred — except in rare and narrow circumstances — from using subpoenas, search warrants, or other compulsory actions to force journalists to reveal sources. The protections would also apply to third parties like email providers and phone companies, shielding them from being forced to release potentially identifying information.”
It’s not a liberal bill, or a conservative bill. Its congressional lead sponsors span the political spectrum, including Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, Mike Lee, R-Utah, Dick Durbin, D-illinois and Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina.
Former California Republican Assemblyman-turned-Congressman Kevin Kiley is among the cosponsors in the House. “Administrations from both political parties have unjustly targeted journalists and used compulsory process to obtain information from them about their sources. Most states have protected journalists from such interference, and it is past time for Congress to do so as well,” argued Kiley earlier this year.
As we wrote in 2023 in support of the law, “Rare enough is bipartisan legislation these days, whether it’s in the halls of Congress or the California Legislature. When it does occur, it’s to be applauded in itself. But when it’s an important law sponsored by both Republican and Democratic legislators that deals with ensuring and even increasing the freedom of the press in our nation, we can’t help but cheer it.”
We stand by that important sentiment, and we urge Cotton’s senatorial colleagues to talk some sense into him, and to unblock the PRESS Act and pass it.